Chapter 103: Set out again, father and son go to the mountains
It was already afternoon when the two returned home. Lin Heng walked into the yard carrying flour and wheat bran. His daughter was lying on the fence of the badger pen, feeding the badgers with vegetable leaves.
"dad!"
When Xiaoxia saw Lin Heng coming in, a smile immediately broke out on her face. She trotted over, hugged his thighs, and acted coquettishly and cutely, asking for a hug.
"Here's a candy!" Lin Heng took out a White Rabbit candy with coconut milk flavor and handed it to his daughter.
"Candy!!" Xiaoxia's eyes suddenly widened. She took it impatiently, unwrapped the candy wrapper and put it into her mouth. Her cheeks bulged like a little hamster.
After giving his daughter a candy, Lin Heng carried the flour into the house and put the things on the cabinet.
Xiulan was blanching the bamboo shoots she had picked yesterday in the kitchen. When she saw her little man coming back, she wiped her hands and walked out of the house.
He picked up a towel and wiped Lin Heng's sweat while asking, "How much flour did you beat?"
Lin Heng couldn't help twisting his face as he looked at his wife, and said with a smile, "One hundred kilograms of wheat produced seventy kilograms of flour."
"That's not bad. Last year's wheat could only produce 67 kilograms of flour." Xiulan nodded and asked Lin Heng to dry himself. She went to bring him the cooled boiled water.
"From now on, our family will mainly eat rice and wheat, and cornmeal occasionally. We don't mind that little bit of money." Lin Heng sat down, drank a sip of water, and said to his wife.
Xiulan looked at him and smiled, "Anyway, the little money I earn as your wife is not enough to buy flour and rice for the whole year. If you have money to buy it, we can eat it. If you don't have money, we can eat cornmeal."
Lin Heng smiled, patted his chest and said: "That's not a problem. You won't get tired of eating all kinds of delicacies from land and sea in the future."
"Then I'll wait." Xiulan smiled.
After saying a few words, Xiulan went back to processing the bamboo shoots.
Lin Heng felt it was a pity to see her drying the bamboo shoots, and said, "Wife, you can try pickling them."
Xiulan turned her head and looked at him: "Yes, there are pickled ones. There are quite a few pickled ones in the jars."
Lin Heng shook his head: "I mean pickled with vinegar."
"How do I do this? I don't know how." Xiulan shook her head.
"Leave some of the blanched bamboo shoots for me, I'll do it," said Lin Heng.
"Okay." Xiulan nodded.
Lin Heng first went to find a clay jar, cleaned it, scalded it twice with boiling water, and then put it aside to drain the water.
Then I picked some chili peppers and chopped them up, cut some ginger slices, and got some green onion roots.
Rinse the fried bamboo shoots twice with cold water, cut into small strips three centimeters wide, and place them on a bamboo sieve to drain the water.
After the water is drained, you can pour it into the jar and add chopped chili peppers, ginger slices, onion roots, and some Sichuan peppercorns.
Then he poured in two packets of white vinegar he had just bought from town, a large amount of salt, some boiled water to cover the bamboo shoots, and finally poured in a little white wine to sterilize it.
"Is it okay now?" Xiulan looked at Lin Heng, curious about how he learned such a strange method.
"Yes, put the lid on it, add some water to the jar and leave it for three days before eating. It's called pickled bamboo shoots." Lin Heng said with a smile.
"Okay, then I'll come back in three days to try it and see how it tastes." Xiulan nodded curiously.
After finishing the bamboo shoots, Xiulan made lunch, including a dish of cold-mixed shepherd's purse and mustard greens, and a plate of shredded potatoes fried with lard.
The sun was too strong at noon, so Lin Heng asked his eldest brother to take his three nephews to swim in the river. Since the two of them lived by the river, they naturally knew how to swim, and it was also nice for the children to play in the water with adults watching over them.
After playing in the water for more than an hour, a few people went home.
"You are still weaving straw hats. You really can't sit still." Lin Heng said to his wife.
Xiulan smiled and said, "I can't sleep at noon, so I'm just sitting there doing nothing."
Lin Heng didn't sleep either. He was taking care of his daughter while reading Tiangong Kaiwu. He really wanted to make a waterwheel described in the book and put it on Red Maple Mountain. He was currently researching how to make it.
This book is pretty good. Many of the wooden tools are very practical. After studying it for a while and just understanding the general idea, his daughter crawled into his arms and said, "Dad, I want to read it!"
"What are you looking at? You don't even recognize the words. Let me read you a fairy tale." Lin Heng put down The Exploitation of the Works of Nature helplessly and found a book of Grimm's Fairy Tales to read to his daughter.
In fact, she couldn't understand many things now, so she just listened for fun. Lin Heng read to kill time, and he read everything to his wife, his older friend.
If there is no entertainment, reading a storybook is also a very good way to pass the time. My daughter fell asleep while reading.
Lin Heng stopped, and Xiulan looked up: "Keep reading, are you only reading to your daughter and not to me?"
"Okay, I'll read it to you." Lin Heng said with a smile. He was too lazy to change books and continued reading Grimm's Fairy Tales.
He read from the time his daughter fell asleep until she woke up, with a break of more than ten minutes in between to let Lin Heng drink two large glasses of water.
In the afternoon, Lin Heng, Xiulan and their daughter went up the hill with hoes to help plant corn. If they finished planting early, Lin Heng could take them to the mountains to hunt.
It is very easy to plant corn on freshly turned soil. Just make a hole every 30 centimeters, throw two corn seeds in, cover them with soil and you're done.
"Lin Heng, come to my house for dinner tonight." The eldest brother shouted while working.
"Okay." Lin Heng nodded and did not refuse.
After finishing planting and returning home, Lin Heng looked at the pheasant that he had kept alone in a bamboo cage yesterday. It still clucked when it saw people coming, but the corn on the ground had disappeared, which meant that it was still eating.
I weighed it yesterday and it was 3.2 jin (15.3 kg). It won't grow any bigger than 4 jin (15.3 catties) at most and will have to be killed and eaten soon.
In the evening, I had dinner at my eldest brother Lin Yue’s house. There was a plate of stir-fried eel which was very good, and there were also broad beans and peanuts that they made themselves.
After dinner, Lin Heng and Xiulan coaxed their daughter to sleep, and then went up the mountain at the same time, of course, to catch cicada monkeys.
"There are a lot of cicada monkeys tonight." Xiulan sighed. She caught ten of them just a few minutes after entering the mountain.
"The most are in July and August." Lin Heng nodded. If he shone the flashlight, he would definitely see one or two.
In this era, wild species resources are still quite abundant.
After a while, Lin Heng had caught forty or fifty of them. Just as he was about to catch a white cicada, he suddenly saw a scorpion running into a cave holding a small insect.
"It's a pity there is no ultraviolet lamp." Lin Heng shook his head. Scorpions are very good whether you catch them to eat or sell them.
A pound of scorpions costs fifty or sixty yuan, but they are very difficult to catch. They are khaki in color. If you shine a flashlight on them, you can't find them at all if they don't move.
But if you use ultraviolet light, the scorpion will be the brightest firefly in the dark, glowing green all over.
Often it itself is unaware of this and thinks it has not been discovered, so it can always be caught with a pincher.
Lin Heng plans to go to the city next time to see if there is an ultraviolet lamp. He can definitely make a small profit by buying one and catching scorpions.
In this era, wild species resources are very abundant and there are many scorpions.
After taking a look at the scorpion that had crawled into the hole, Lin Heng continued to catch cicada monkeys.
There is no moon tonight, but the sky is full of stars, like countless pearls hanging in the sky.
After catching the cicada monkey, Lin Heng took his wife home. Xiulan seemed a little unhappy.
"Let's fry it now, otherwise it will go bad tomorrow morning." Lin Heng said as he went to the stove to light a fire.
"Okay." Xiulan nodded. If she wanted to fry it directly, she didn't need to drown it in water. She could just throw it in.
The fire was lit and some rapeseed oil was poured in. After it burned, Xiulan threw the cicada monkey in. Along with the sizzling sound, the smell of burnt food came instantly.
Even though he had just eaten, Lin Heng felt a little salivating and his appetite was whetted.
It was fried quickly and Xiulan scooped it up and poured it into a small bamboo basket to control the oil.
Lin Heng buried a piece of wood as a fire starter, poured a bowl of cicada monkey and said, "Come on, honey, I'll take you to the backyard to watch the stars while eating cicada monkey."
"I don't want to go." Xiulan said reservedly.
"You have to go whether you want to or not." Lin Heng put his arm around his wife's waist and walked out.
"Oh, I haven't even put the lid on the oil bottle yet." Xiulan exclaimed.
"It doesn't matter."
Lin Hengcai did not let go. He pulled his wife to the backyard and sat on the rocking chair under the grape trellis.
There are no vines yet, and billions of stars can be seen clearly.
Xiulan was hugged by Lin Heng and could only lean on him obediently. They looked at the starry sky while feeding each other cicada monkeys.
The two of them finished a bowl of cicada monkey in no time, and then they looked at the starry sky in silence for a while.
After a while, Lin Heng turned Xiulan's head over, looked at her greasy red lips and wanted to bite them.
"I just ate, stop that!" Xiulan held him down.
"What are you afraid of? It's the same whether it's in your mouth or mine." Lin Heng smiled and bit it.
"Hmm~"
Xiulan didn't want to, but her body became limp again and she was out of control, and her eyes opened wide.
The open-air environment made her particularly shy, so she quickly closed her eyes, pretending that she knew nothing and cooperated with Lin Heng's actions.
When the love reached its peak, Lin Heng simply picked up his wife.
"ah!"
Xiulan screamed, put her arms around Lin Heng’s neck and went into the house.
The bright starlight shone through, making Xiulan's skin look exceptionally white, like a peeled egg.
…
The process of creating life is always indescribable. The two of them were busy until midnight before they could rest.
Xiulan hugged her husband in her arms and felt like hitting him. Didn’t she just not let him come yesterday, and yet he still held a grudge against her today?
He lay down and didn't move in the middle of playing, and asked her to take the initiative. It was really abominable.
This novel experience made her neck turn red with embarrassment, and she wanted to punch him twice right now.
But looking at Lin Heng who was already asleep, she still couldn't bring herself to do it. After thinking it over, she decided to hug him in her arms and suffocate him to death.
But the man in her arms was pretending to sleep, pretending to dream of returning to his childhood in his mother's arms, which made her cheeks flush and her body go limp, so she had to push him away.
Nothing happened that night, and it started raining heavily again the next morning. Within an hour, the rain was pouring down and the water in the river became muddy.
Around nine or ten o'clock, the rain stopped, the sky was blue, and the sun was high. In less than half an hour, it was so hot that people would sweat without even moving.
Lin Heng held the bowl and watched the magical changes in the weather.
In the afternoon, I went to help plant corn. This continued for several days until July 15th of the Gregorian calendar, when the corn in the wheat field was finally planted.
"Brother, Dad, there's not much farm work left with just corn. How about we go to the mountains and try hunting?"
On the way home in the afternoon, Lin Heng looked at his father and elder brother and asked.
"Sure, I can give it a try since I'm not busy recently." Lin Yue nodded, wanting to try his luck.
"Okay then, let's set off together tomorrow." Father Lin nodded.
Lin Wei, who was walking behind, was hesitant to speak. He did not meet the requirements in the final exam, with scores of 68 in Chinese, 75 in mathematics, and 51 in ideology and morality.
So he was too embarrassed to ask to go along.
Lin Heng glanced at his nephew, then looked at his eldest brother Lin Yue and said, "Lin Wei is also on summer vacation, so let's take him out to play together. It's also good for him to show us something."
"Dad, I can watch things for you and I promise not to run around." Lin Wei said quickly. He looked at Lin Heng with eyes full of gratitude.
Lin Yue glanced at his eldest son and nodded, "You can go, but if you don't obey and run around, you have to come back immediately."
"Don't worry, Dad. If I run away, I'll be your grandson...you can kill me."
Lin Wei said, patting his chest.
"You kid!" Lin Yue raised his hand and hit him.
Lin Heng looked at his nephew and warned him again: "It's very dangerous in the wild, there are poisonous snakes, poisonous insects and wasps everywhere, I don't want you to go either.
But considering that you have worked hard to pass the exam, I will treat it as a reward for you, but you must follow the rules. "
"Okay, second dad, if you think I'm disobedient, you can tie me up and beat me." In order to go hunting with the adults, Lin Wei tried his best.
"Now that we've made the decision, let's prepare. Finish it tonight and leave tomorrow."
Father Lin looked at the three of them and said.
"Dad, and brother, please prepare some more brown ropes and hemp ropes. Hunting in the summer requires traps, and it is too difficult to find them in the woods by yourself." Lin Heng said to his father and eldest brother.
None of them can hunt, but they can make some traps.
This time he plans to be gone for ten days or half a month. The time period is long, so traps are naturally the most useful. The probability of catching prey is definitely greater than that found by people.
"I understand. Don't worry, I'll rub some overnight." The eldest brother Lin Yue said with a smile.
After returning home, Lin Heng started to pack. He had been preparing ropes and other things for some time, and all the things he used for hunting last time were still put together.
Now he has added two new things. One is a pot. He bought a small iron pot in town yesterday. It can cook for four people.
One is a kettle for drinking water, which is suitable for holding water or wine.
"I'll prepare food for you. What do you want to eat?" Xiulan asked after she finished feeding the badger and walked in.
Lin Heng shook his head and said, “No need, I will just bring rice and noodles and make it myself this time.
This time I plan to stay for ten days or half a month. If the time is too short, I won’t be able to catch anything.
So you don't have to cook. I bought some noodles, some flour and rice, some oil and salt, and you can go up and cook it yourself."
"It took so long." Xiulan was a little surprised.
"If it wasn't inconvenient in the wild, I would have taken you with me." Lin Heng said with a smile.
"Then I'll stir-fry some pickled cabbage for you, and get some chopped peppers and fermented tofu. It will be delicious when you go up there."
Xiulan said again.
"Okay." Lin Heng nodded.
Xiulan went to the kitchen to help, and he continued to clean up.
After packing up my things, I played games with my daughter. She could play whatever she wanted. I won’t be able to see her anymore, and I still miss her a little.
Xiulan prepared the food for Lin Heng on the mountain, and also fried his favorite bacon, pickled radish and cold-mixed gray vegetables for him.
Add some cold cucumbers, fried green tomatoes, and an egg yolk soup, and you have a total of four dishes and one soup.
"By the way, you forgot about the bamboo shoots you soaked. I'll go get some for you."
The dishes were served on the table. Xiulan remembered this incident and went to the kitchen again.
Soon the light yellow pickled bamboo shoots were brought to the table.
"Today's dishes are abundant."
Lin Heng chuckled, took a bite of the pickled bamboo shoots, and nodded, "That's the taste, sour, spicy, crispy, and very memorable."
Xiulan curiously picked one up and tasted it, her eyes lit up: "It's really good, different from the ones pickled in the sour jar."
After eating another one, Xiulan continued, "I'll make some more later, and you can tell me the trick."
"Dad, I want to eat!!" Xiaoxia saw that the two were eating enthusiastically and wanted to try it too.
"It's very spicy. If you don't believe me, try it." Lin Heng picked up a small piece and gave it to her.
After tasting it, she immediately stuck out her tongue because of the spiciness and shook her head like a rattle: "No, no, it's too spicy!"
"Come, have some gray vegetables." Lin Heng fed another vegetable to his precious daughter.
While feeding his daughter, Lin Heng said, "Just do as I did that day. Remember to scald the jar twice with boiling water to disinfect it, and add a little white wine to sterilize it at the end."
"Okay." Xiulan nodded and took note of it.
Lin Heng buried his head in eating.
The meal tonight was very appetizing, but the cost was a little high.
After dinner, Lin Heng took a bath and had a good rest to recharge his energy as he was going to go hunting in the mountains tomorrow.
The next morning, Xiulan heated up the leftovers from last night. After Lin Heng ate, he brought Xiongba to the old house.
Father Lin, eldest brother, and eldest nephew were all hiding under the eaves eating noodles.
"Lin Heng, have you eaten? If not, there's more in the pot."
Mother Lin looked at him and asked.
"I've eaten at home. You guys take your time. There's no rush." Lin Heng shook his head and said.
Lin Wei finished his noodles in two bites, looked at Lin Heng and said, "Second father, what prey are you targeting this time?"
It was so exciting for a five or six-year-old kid to be able to go up the mountain and hunt.
"I don't have any target. I just fight whatever I encounter." Lin Heng said with a smile.
His target was the musk deer, but hunting was too dependent on luck, so it was better not to brag.
"My goal this time is to shoot a pheasant and two rabbits." Lin Wei said, patting his chest.
"I hope you can achieve this goal." Lin Heng smiled. His nephew thought hunting was fun, but after he went this time, he probably wouldn't want to play it again.
"Let's go."
Soon, Father Lin and elder brother Lin Yue finished eating, put on their backpacks and set off.
"Be careful." Lin's mother warned.
"Don't worry." The three of them waved their hands, walked out from the back mountain, walked through the woods to the west side of the village, trying their best not to let the villagers know that they were all going hunting.
Otherwise, it is inevitable that some people may have bad intentions and want to break into the house and steal things.
"Or should we go to the place where you hunted wild boar last time?" Father Lin asked as they walked.
"Yes, it's not far from Taibai Mountain." Lin Heng nodded.
"Dad, that's where you dug the ginseng, right?" Lin Yue asked.
"No, it's in another direction, but it's not far from Sanchagou." Father Lin shook his head.
"Then we can look for it this time. Maybe we can find others."
While chatting, a few people headed towards the mountains.
(End of this chapter)
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